What might it mean to recognize that autistic people—after a century of being pathologized—seem to be particularly aligned with certain of the qualities that are described in early Buddhist thought as supreme?                                     

A key word in contemporary autism theory is monotropism. This is also referred to as “single attention,” “concentration,” or “perseverance.” Also mentioned, often anecdotally, is an “unusual concern” with non-harming, and an intense connection with non-human animals. The overlap with the paramitas of virya (perseverance), dhyana (one-pointed concentration), and perhaps sila (ethics), are conspicuous. 

The diagnostic list known as the Broader Autism Phenotype Constellation consists of sensory awareness, non-conformity, attention, systemizing, object-orientation, and memory. While these traits are familiar among other human traits, some of us were born directly beneath this particular cluster of stars. In combination, I relate them to wide-open sense doors, “going against the stream,” relational interdependence, and an inclination toward and ease with shamatha (tranquility). To be clear, I am not proposing that to be autistic is to be awake, nor that one needs to be autistic to awaken. Yet I find this a compelling intersection to contemplate and a vivid edge of experiencing to abide in.                

In 2018 I attended a retreat with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo in which she expounded on the Therigatha (Verses on the Elder Nuns). She also shared Atisha’s Lojong Root Verses, or 21 Lines of Advice, written in the 11th century. Thus I heard: The supreme conduct is to be in disharmony with the world… the supreme generosity is non-attachment… the supreme patience is to take the lowest place…

The simple verses resounded, contextualizing the paramitas both as and with provocation, while also remaining mundane. And hearing them supported by Jetsunma’s keen and buoyant gloss, accompanied by her broad grin, blinking eyes, and inquiring brow, was a doubly sparkling gem.

Having delved into the literature of autism, and plainly recognizing myself in descriptions of autistic people, I sought and received a diagnosis in early 2020. This afforded me an opportunity to look back to my childhood through a new lens. I was assessed by someone with long-term experience in the field, who confirmed that I thoroughly fit the profile. The process was revelatory; until now I had eschewed identity labels of any kind. The supreme wisdom is to not grasp onto anything as the self. And here I was, categorized, feeling like a fully-fledged autistic person, rather than a non-human. I’d always felt estranged from our species in general; all of a sudden I felt included, and thereby, inclusive. Rather than reifying self, identifying with fellow Autists brought non-self into much brighter awareness.     

In part, I see my autistic awakening as the unexpected culmination of a phase of formal practice with a Soto Zen teacher, with whom I felt markedly connected. In the last few years, each time we met, I would leave feeling perplexed and hurt. Not wanting to turn away from what was difficult, I kept recalling Atisha’s admonition: the supreme spiritual teacher is the one who exposes our hidden flaws. But I couldn’t see which hidden flaws were being exposed. Was confusion as to what my flaws were my flaw? Was seeing him as a supreme spiritual teacher my flaw? These tautological loops persevered. In retrospect, what I perceived as his increasing unfriendliness coincided with my gradual dropping of some subtle aspects of unconsciously passing, as my natural dysfluency and atypical physical behaviors emerged. 

 The supreme method is to be natural. Autistic people, especially those of us with female bodies, are known to camouflage our autistic qualities in order to be accepted by non-autistics. This takes a tremendous amount of energy. The supreme effort is letting go of activity. I saw this relationship mirroring those of my childhood, when peers sensed my vulnerability and responded with maltreatment. Viewing the situation through the twin lenses of dharma and autism allowed me to step away, with both grief and relief. The supreme accomplishment is a continuous decrease of disturbing emotions. I was able to return my faith and attention to where it belongs: in and on the path.

Being quite literal, as Autists are known to be, I am often literally walking on paths. One day, circling Mount Tamalpais counterclockwise, the thought came, “A-tisha? Or Au-tisha?” It let itself go, as thoughts do while a-walking. Some months later I read aloud the root verses, doing the best I could to share their candlelight with two friends whom I met last summer at Autscape, a conference by and for autistic people. (Organized in the UK, it had been moved online.) One of these friends asked if I would read through them a second time. Without deliberation I did so, now substituting “autistic” for the keyword “supreme,” which recurs in most of the lines. This was not to draw an equivalency between the two words, but to replace a humble one for a hierarchical one. It seemed to all three of us to be appropriate and pertinent, describing—in an amalgam of reality, reminder, and aspiration—what we claim as autistic traits and tendencies, which can be cultivated by anyone.                  

I then wrote out the adapted text and together we refined it. The lines remain ambiguously between a proposal, a call, and a challenge, for perspectives and for directions to grow in. The context is the individual and collective experiences of rejection—both micro and macro—for autistic ways of being. It is a response to the claims made by clinicians, and widely accepted, that we Autists are selfish, preoccupied with unimportant things, move and speak inappropriately, and cannot cooperate. That we are unfortunate aberrations, rather than welcome participants in the matrix of life on this planet. We don’t accept this, nor do we believe in a fixed conception of autism. An autistic identity is as elusive as any other. As E.H. Gombrich wrote in 1950, “there is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists,” so it is for autism and Autists. Self-advocacy is a necessary response to discrimination if we are to shift from vertical to horizontal ways of ordering the world, from official judgments to conversations, with mutual recognition and benefit.                                   

These verses are not meant only for autistic folks, but for anyone who is willing to let go of any supremacist views they may be holding—of course including those of race and class and gender, but also of physical ability, intellectual ability, and of species—in order to live wholly. Atisha’s lines could be adapted into an even terser form, without any qualifying adjective. Please consider this version as provisional:                               

AUTISHA’S VERSES                                                         

Autistic understanding is to realize the absence of self

The autistic mind is rewilded

The utmost autistic quality is vast citta

The autistic example is of continually observing the mind 

The autistic remedy is to know that nothing has self-nature 

The autistic pilgrimage disagrees with the worldly                                            

The supreme accomplishment is a decrease of troubles

The clear sign of this accomplishment is a decrease of desire 

Autistic generosity is non-attachment

The pivot of ethics is pacific

The peerless patience is to take whichever place

The greatest perseverance is abandoning activity

Autistic concentration is to not alter awareness

Autistic wisdom is to not conceive of anything as a self

The true friend questions our errors

& their counsel is to attend to those errors

The supreme companions are mindfulness and clear knowing 

The best incentives are hindrances and aches

The autistic method is to be natural

The way of benefiting is to help others enter the open 

Benefit is a mind that turns

Autists are known not only to sometimes use pronouns irregularly, but also to mix our metaphors, analogies, and similes. So, to close authentically: abiding in the particular pivot of the Buddhadharma and autistic awareness has felt like being in a lightning storm of insight.

There are many facets of this, and we hope to continue to slowly move within this particular and subtle alloy-sky of precious-ordinary elements.

The post Learning with Autisha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Not knowing how to act during a difficult moment can be frustrating—but there’s a way to get better at it. The following excerpt is from Pema Chödrön’s The Compassion Book: Teachings for Awakening the Heart, which features the 59 Tibetan Buddhist lojong, or “mind-training,” slogans, as well as concise commentaries to guide you toward a compassionate way of living.

Pema Chödrön advises picking a slogan at random each morning and then applying its message to experiences that arise as you go about your day. Over time, this practice will equip you with quick, skillful pointers for how to act (and react) in any given situation.

Related: Making Friends with Oneself 

Here are eight to get you started:

In postmeditation, be a child of illusion
When you finish sitting meditation, if things become heavy and solid, be fully present and realize that everything is actually pliable, open, and workable. This is instruction for meditation in action, realizing that you don’t have to feel claustrophobic because there is always lots of room, lots of space.

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation
The unexpected will stop your mind. Rest in that space. When thoughts start again, do tonglen [a meditation on compassion], breathing in whatever pain you may feel, thinking that others also feel like this, and gradually becoming more and more willing to feel this pain with the wish that others won’t have to suffer. If it is a “good” shock, send out any joy you may feel, wishing for others to feel it also. Meeting the unexpected is also an opportunity to practice patience and nonaggression.

Related: Tonglen on the Spot 

All dharma agrees at one point
The entire Buddhist teachings (dharma) are about lessening one’s self-absorption, one’s ego-clinging. This is what brings happiness to you and all beings.

Always maintain only a joyful mind
Constantly apply cheerfulness, if for no other reason than because you are on this spiritual path. Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up.

Don’t talk about injured limbs
Don’t try to build yourself up by talking about other people’s defects.

Work with the greatest defilements first
Gain insight into your greatest obstacles—pride, aggression, self-denigration, and so forth—and work with those first. Do this with clarity and compassion.

Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow
Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.

♦

From The Compassion Book: Teachings for Awakening the Heart by Pema Chödrön © 2006. Reprinted with permission from Shambhala Publications. www.shambhala.com

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It’s natural to be disappointed that you haven’t been able to vanquish your own worst faults. But do you have to continue feeling that way? The teachings of lojong say: No, you don’t have to continue feeling that way! In fact, you can use the mistakes you make to propel yourself further along the path.

Lojong, which means “mind training” in Tibetan, is the term for a set of meditations and daily life disciplines that tame and transform our mental afflictions, simultaneously uprooting the source of our suffering—our ego-fixation. The practice set consists of 59 aphorisms written by the 12th-century Tibetan saint Chekhawa Yeshe Dorje; they’re also known as the Seven Points of Mind Training.

Every one of us has ego-fixation. The Buddha’s teaching about this goes all the way back to the second of his four noble truths—that the cause of suffering is clinging and fixation, and the greatest of these is fixation on our concept of self. Once we conceive of it, seeing it as a solid and separate entity, we spend all of our time trying to protect and gratify it. Fixation is the engine that makes it “go.”

But beyond the self, we can cling to anything— people, possessions, situations, ideas—and sometimes we may feel as though we’ll never gain control over ourselves. When we make a mistake as a result of attachment, we often beat ourselves up about it. Oh, there I go again, we may think. I can’t believe I lost my temper. That’s what I do, anyway. But then I remember something my teacher, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, taught me—my favorite lojong slogan:

Three objects, three poisons, three seeds of virtue.

In a 19th-century commentary on the lojong teachings, the Tibetan master Jamgon Kongtrul (1813–1899) explains that the three poisons are attachment, aversion, and ignorance, which are always arising in the mind in response to the three objects: things you like, things you don’t like, and things you’re indifferent toward.

To take control of these poisons, Kongtrul says, we should notice them “as soon as they arise.” We may not actually be able to notice them as soon as they arise, but perhaps we can catch them after five minutes, or even two weeks down the road. Whenever it occurs, the moment you notice it, take hold of that mental affliction with your attention and purposefully turn it into an aspiration. It’s as though you see the mental affliction as raw material, the way a potter would view clay. You don’t see clay as a problem; you see it as an opportunity to create something.

It’s as though you see the mental affliction as a raw material, the way a potter would view clay.

So if your emotional state is upsetting, try to step outside of it— even if it’s just for an instant—and say, “I am angry,” “I am jealous,” “I am competitive,” or “I am attached.” Whatever it is that you’re feeling, recognize it. In that instant of separation and acknowledgment, you can use a formula Kongtrul offered and say, “May my mental affliction contain the mental affliction of all sentient beings.” You use your imagination to recognize that there are other people on the planet at this very moment feeling just like you feel. You are no longer alone.

Furthermore, you’re no longer feeding the engine of the mental affliction with words like, “I am angry. I am bad,” or “That person is bad.” You’ve taken the energy away from those stories, allowing that energy to turn into something else—an aspiration for positive change.

You do that by moving to the next step in Kongtrul’s formula, paraphrased here for brevity:

By my working with this moment of mental affliction, may I and all sentient beings be freed from this mental affliction.

That’s powerful stuff. We aspire—just by stepping outside our affliction, engaging it, and working with it—to accrue for ourselves (and all beings!) the seed of virtue to be free from this mental affliction.

The final part of Kongtrul’s formula takes our aspiration higher:

Through this, may we all become buddhas, the complete freedom from mental affliction.

The whole process may seem cumbersome at first, but with practice it will become second nature and give us a new way to view what we think of as faults and failings.

Kongtrul’s technique allows us to take the energy away from our mental afflictions and transform that energy into an aspiration for goodness: May I be good, may all things be good, and may all beings be free.

We’ve made a conscious turn away from feeding our mental affliction and taken ourselves somewhere else. We’ve taken that thing that was dark and unworkable and turned it into something light and workable. That moment is my favorite moment. Even in my own feelings of disappointment with myself, I know that Kongtrul’s method will work. I know it will work. I’ve used it again and again. Of course, there are days when I’m so upset about something I don’t want to use it. But I have to. Because that’s the way to sanity.

You can even use this method without full sincerity, through gritted teeth. Any way you use it will create a momentum of change within you.

This technique can also be used to generate compassion for yourself. “May my mistake, this thing I just goofed up on, contain the mistakes of all sentient beings, and by working through this feeling of mistake, may I and all sentient beings be free of it. May we all become buddhas.”

For me, this unhooks the feeling of “I’ve been practicing for so many years but I can’t get on top of my anger.” If you have anger, it’s not the end of everything. You don’t have to stop practicing because you’re angry. Use the formula, take hold of the anger, and turn it into an aspiration. Don’t sit there and feel bad that you’re not further along in your practice. Do something with that feeling instead. 

♦

Watch Lama Kathy Wesley’s January 2019 Dharma Talk series, “Buddhism’s Alchemy of Emotion,” at tricycle.org/dharmatalks.

The post Your Mistakes Are Progress appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For well over a year, Acharya Judy Lief, teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, has been offering weekly commentary on one of Atisha’s 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans, which serve as the basis for a complete practice. With this week’s entry, Judy has now given teachings on all 59 slogans. We would like to thank Judy for her extensive guidance and for the tremendous knowledge, insight, and diligence she has shown throughout this process.

Atisha (980-1052 CE) was an Indian adept who brought to Tibet a systematized approach to bodhicitta (the desire to awaken for the sake of all sentient beings) and loving-kindness, through working with these slogans. Judy edited Chogyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), which contains Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentaries on the lojong (“mind-training”) teachings. Each entry includes a practice.

Preliminary Teachings

Week 1

Week 2

Lojong Slogans 1-20

1. First train in the preliminaries

2. Regard all dharmas as dreams

3. Examine the nature of unborn awareness

4. Self-liberate even the antidote

5. Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence

6. In post-meditation, be a child of illusion

6.1. Absolute and Relative Bodhichitta

7. Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath

8. Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue

9. In all activities train with slogans

10. Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself

11. When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi

12. Drive all blames into one

13. Be grateful to everyone

14. Seeing confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection

15. Four practices are the best of methods

16. Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join it with meditation

17. Practice the five strengths, the condensed heart instructions

18. The ejection of consciousness

19. All dharma agrees at one point

20. Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one

Slogans 21 – 40

21. Always maintain only a joyful mind

22. If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained

23. Always abide by the three basic principles

24. Change your attitude, but remain natural

25. Don’t talk about injured limbs

26. Don’t ponder others

27. Work with the greatest defilements first

28. Abandon any hope of fruition

29. Abandon poisonous food

30. Don’t be so predictable

31. Don’t malign others

32. Don’t wait in ambush

33. Don’t bring things to a painful point

34. Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow

35. Don’t try and be the fastest

36. Don’t act with a twist

37. Don’t make gods into demons

38. Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your own happiness

39. All activities should be done with one intention

40. Correct all wrongs with one intention

Slogans 41 – 59

41. Two activities: one at the beginning, one at the end

42. Whichever of the two occurs, be patient

43. Observe these two, even at the risk of your life

44. Train in the three difficulties

45. Take on the three principal causes

46. Pay heed that the three never wane

47. Keep the three inseparable

48. Train without bias in all areas. It is crucial always to do this pervasively and wholeheartedly

49. Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment

50. Don’t be swayed by external circumstances

51. This time, practice the main points

52. Don’t misinterpret

53. Don’t vacillate

54. Train wholeheartedly

55. Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing

56. Don’t wallow in self-pity

57. Don’t be jealous

58. Don’t be frivolous

59. Don’t expect applause

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The Mind-Training Slogans, Slogan #53

Each Friday, Acharya Judy Lief, teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, comments on one of Atisha’s 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans, which serve as the basis for a complete practice.

Atisha (980-1052 CE) was an Indian adept who brought to Tibet a systematized approach to bodhicitta (the desire to awaken for the sake of all sentient beings) and loving-kindness, through working with these slogans. Judy edited Chogyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), which contains Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentaries on the lojong (“mind-training”) teachings.

Each entry includes a practice.

Read all the lojong slogans here.

53. Don’t vacillate.

When you first encounter the dharma, you may be intrigued but wary, or quick to be inspired. If you are inspired, you may jump in enthusiastically, and read all sorts of books, take tons of classes, and practice a lot. But such enthusiasm tends to be short-lived, and after a while, your interest and energy begins to peter out. You begin to have second thoughts about the whole thing.

If you are more wary, you may decide to spend more time checking it out before you make a commitment. Before you dip your toe into the dharma, you want to find out about different teachers and communities and read a few more books. Although you are drawn to the dharma, you are afraid to go too far without more understanding of what you are getting into. But whenever you reach the point of being about to make a commitment, you hesitate and step back.

No matter how you enter into the practice of mind training, the idea is to become more steady and confident. Constantly changing your mind about what you are doing drains away your enthusiasm and leaves you depleted of energy. You sink into a kind of undertow of self-doubt. It is important to break this pattern and to develop more self-confidence and certainty in the dharma and in your own insight.

When we lack confidence, what happens is that we think too much. It is hard to make a decision because there is no end of options, alternatives, contingencies, and what if’s. Commitment is scary because it means choosing one direction and abandoning others, but unless we do so, it will be hard to make any progress in any direction. So once you see what you need to do, the point is to go ahead and do it!

The idea of this slogan is that once you make a decision to practice mind training, you should stick with it so that it becomes a steady thread throughout your life. Although your circumstances are always changing, your commitment to mind training should be unwavering.

Today’s practice

When your enthusiasm seems to be flickering, try to drop down a layer to a more steady and fundamental stream of inspiration. By placing whatever you experience within that stream, you can gradually gain greater certainty in the view and practice of lojong.

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The Mind-Training Slogans, Slogan #52 

Each Friday, Acharya Judy Lief, teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, comments on one of Atisha’s 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans, which serve as the basis for a complete practice.

Atisha (980-1052 CE) was an Indian adept who brought to Tibet a systematized approach to bodhicitta (the desire to awaken for the sake of all sentient beings) and loving-kindness, through working with these slogans. Judy edited Chogyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), which contains Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentaries on the lojong (“mind-training”) teachings.

Each entry includes a practice.

Read all the lojong slogans here.

52. Don’t misinterpret.

This slogan focuses on six qualities—patience, yearning, excitement, compassion, priorities, and joy—and how they can be misinterpreted. More generally, the point is to see how we can twist things so that our avoidance of the dharma is considered to be a virtue rather than a fault. We are continually tempted to misinterpret teachings designed to soften our ego-fixation in such a way that they instead add more fuel to our self-absorption and distractedness.

An undercurrent that runs through this slogan is the strong pull of samsara. Lojong practice goes against the grain and threatens our cozy samsaric cocoon, so we try to figure out ways to be dharma practitioners without having to give anything up. We long for transformation, but we really don’t want to change anything. So we twist the teachings to fit our personal agenda. We pay lip service, but our heart really lies elsewhere.

The first thee categories—patience, yearning, and excitement—are quite straightforward. Misinterpreted patience is being patient with the hassles of samsara, but not patient with dharma practice. Misinterpreted yearning is to have constant yearning for more money, more pleasure, and more security, but to have very little yearning to train the mind or cultivate loving-kindness. Misinterpreted excitement is to find mindless entertainment and the endless pursuit of wealth exciting, but not be excited about the study and practice of the dharma.

The fourth category, misinterpreted compassion, is more provocative. Misinterpreted compassion means to feel compassion for the hardships faced by people who are dedicated to the dharma, but not to feel compassion for evildoers. According to this slogan, true compassion is not based on picking and choosing, and it is not based on sorting people into who is worthy of our compassion and who is not.

The fifth category, twisted priorities, could also be called the challenge of scheduling. Somehow, we always manage to find time in our schedules for what entertains us or advances our self-interest, but find it difficult to find time to practice the dharma.

The sixth and last category, twisted joy, means to take more delight in seeing your enemy suffer or your competitor fail than when you see someone succeed in overcoming confusion through dharmic practice.

These six categories are examples of the many ways that we try to disguise as virtues the many ways we feed our neuroses and our fixation on the self.

Today’s practice

Start with the misinterpretation of priorities. List out your main activities for a week, and calculate how much time you spend on each category, such as work, sleep, TV, study, practice, socializing etc. What does this tell you about your priorities? What would need to shift to free up a little time for dharma practice?

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30. Don’t be so predictable.

When we work with mind training and the development of bodhichitta, we are interrupting our usual way of going about business. We find that many of our actions are programmed and extremely predictable and we notice that in other people as well.  This is why it is so easy to push each other’s buttons. It is why it is so easy to manipulate and to be manipulated.

If we do not make an effort to do otherwise, if we do not pay attention, then much of what we do will be in the form of automatic reactions. We can see this whole process as it is happening, although often we do not. We might recognize it in the sinking feeling of “Here I go again.” We might see it coming, but our reaction is so fast that we can’t stop ourselves.

This kind of predictability is fueled by the self-centered undercurrent of fascination with our own concerns and disinterest in others except to the extent that they either threaten or feed our own desires. When someone does us harm, we hang onto our grudge about that for a very long time. But when someone helps us, we take it for granted, and soon forget it.

We do not have to be so programmed and predictable. If we cultivate awareness enough to step back a bit from simply reacting, we can insert a gap or a pause before being carried away. In that little gap there is the freedom to respond in a fresh way, less predetermined. When we respond from a more dispassionate perspective, and are not just caught in the game of defending or promoting our ego, it is as though a different world opens up. We begin to see how our limited focus has prevented us from developing a bigger vision of what is going on and how best to respond to it.

Today’s practice

When you feel threatened, don’t get defensive, pause, and then react. When you are praised, don’t just lap it up, pause, and then react. What do you notice?  Explore the contrast between using experience to further your own agenda and seeing it from a broader perspective.

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28. Abandon Any Hope of Fruition

This slogan undercuts our attachment to either success or failure. It is a kind of positive giving up. Abandoning any hope of fruition does not mean abandoning our projects and ambitions. Instead it points to a way of going about things that is present focused rather than fixated on results.

When we do anything, we usually do it for a purpose. We have some aim in mind and we hope to accomplish that aim. We hope to succeed rather than fail. That is fine. But what then happens is that our thoughts of success or failure begin to overpower the task at hand. The fear of failure can make us timid and unwilling to take risk our clinging to a successful outcome can make us more and more tight. We become impatient and grit our teeth trying to force our desired outcome. The hope of fruition and the fear of failure go hand-in-hand.

So much education and so much of the conventional thinking about how to motivate people is based on that model of hope and fear. We learn to expect some kind of reward or confirmation any time we succeed and to expect some form of punishment when we do not.  But according to this slogan, it is better to abandon that whole approach. In that way, when we act, there are no hidden agendas or ulterior motives.

Even the practice of developing loving kindness through slogan practice could be tainted by this desire to be recognized and confirmed. Our attempts to develop loving kindness may begin to be more about cultivating an image of being wise and compassionate than actually helping other people. Because of our need to confirm ourselves, to prove to ourselves that our efforts have been successful, we may try to force a reaction of appreciation or gratitude on those we are supposedly selflessly helping. According to this slogan, there is more room for real kindness and compassion to arise if let go of our attachment to results, or at least loosen it a little.

Today’s practice

How is it possible to maintain your focus, to “keep your eyes on the prize,” without getting fixated on results? As you go about your activities, pay attention to the difference between having a goal and being taken over by your hopes, fears, and speculations.

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Jeff Bridges enters the living room of his hotel suite carrying a dark blue Shambhala paperback by Chögyam Trungpa entitled Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-kindness. “One reason I’m anxious—because I have some anxiety about this interview, like you do,” he says, as he arranges his long body on the couch, “is that I wish I could be more facile with these things that I find so interesting and care about and want to express to people.” He opens the book. “This will be a challenge for me,” he says. “But I’ll attempt it.”

Bridges is 61. Solidly built, he reminds me of an Andalusian carriage horse in late prime, trustworthy and sensitive. He is wearing jeans, clogs, a chambray shirt, and the Rolex Submariner watch that his late father, Lloyd Bridges, wore on the television series Sea Hunt. Were it not for his lightly mussed hair and that expensive watch, he could be a motorcycle mechanic.

We’re talking in Austin, Texas, where he’s filming a violent, darkly comic version of the Western True Grit—the first “period Oater” (as Variety put it) to be directed by the filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen. In it, Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, an aging U.S. Marshal who has, not surprisingly, a drinking problem. Like the washed-up country singer of Crazy Heart, the self-betraying lounge pianist of The Fabulous Baker Boys, and the reluctant ex-convict father of American Heart, Cogburn is one of a string of beautiful losers Bridges has portrayed teetering on the brink of some sort of redemption. His acting is so naturalistic and seemingly effortless, in fact, that you can forget that it’s acting.

But anyone who mistakes Bridges for the beatific, potsmoking, Zenlike Dude of The Big Lebowski misses much of what quickens beneath the surface. He was born in 1949 in Los Angeles into an unusually stable movie family, to a loving mother made panicky by the recent loss of an earlier son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Anxious enough to stutter as a child, he still struggles with what his mother, Dorothy (who also practiced meditation seriously before her death last year), called abulia: difficulty committing to a path of action. He’s been married for 33 years, has acted in 66 films, and helps fund the End Hunger Network of Los Angeles, dedicated to ending the hunger suffered by 16.7 million American children. On its website, he is quoted as saying, “If we discovered that another country was doing this to our children, we would declare war.”

In his hotel bedroom are his meditation bell (a travel-sized gong timer) and a stack of Buddhist books, including Thich Nhat Hanh’s Walking Meditation and three by Pema Chödrön. Most days, before heading out to the film set he meditates for half an hour: following his breath, noticing his thoughts, sitting in a chair with his spine straight and his hands resting lightly on his knees.

Right now he’s intently focused on the blue paperback he holds in his hand: Trungpa’s interpretation of the lojong [mindtraining] teachings—59 slogans distilled by the 12th-century Tibetan master Geshe Chekawa from the writings of Atisha, a 10th-century Indian Buddhist teacher. They are pithy guideposts along the Mahayana path: “Transform all mishaps into the path of Bodhi,” “Regard all dharmas as dreams,” “Be grateful to everyone,” “Don’t seek others’ pain as the limbs of your own happiness,” and “Always maintain a joyful mind.” Throughout our interview he keeps threading back to these slogans, some simple and others arcane. “The basic idea,” he says, as he opens Trungpa’s book, “is that the things that come up, that we’ve labeled negatively—those are real opportunities and gifts for us to wake up.”

Turning pages, Bridges begins, “I just saw the word joy, and I see it’s underlined twice, and I got a star beside it, so let me read this aloud and see if it’s interesting. “As you are dozing off, think of strong determination, that as soon as you wake up in the morning you are going to maintain your practice with continual exertion, which means joy.” We were talking earlier about anxiety, excitement. That’s an exertion of sorts. But you can have that same exertion, but have this joyful attitude. Like I can study my lines for the day because I’m anxious about it, or I can just have fun studying lines. This word joy—another one of the slogans is “Approach all situations with a joyful mind”—I find in my practice joy is a big part of it. My parents were very joyful people. Whenever my father came onto a set to play a part, you got the sense that he really enjoyed being there, and this was going to be a good time. And everyone was just—[raises his arms] raised! When you relax like that, you’re not trying to force your thing onto the thing. You’re just diggin’ it. My mother was the same way. That’s what I aspire to.”

So there’s joy on the one hand—and you mentioned negative things, as an opportunity to wake up. Is this playing out in your acting in True Grit? [Long pause.] It’s difficult to talk about the work, because it’s like a magician talking about how the trick is done.

How about your character, then, the drunken, overweight U.S. Marshal who teams up with a 14-year-old girl to track down her father’s killer? I don’t know if it has anything to do with the lojong thing, but most things do, in a weird way. A bunch of things are popping in my mind. [Pause.] “True grit” means that you’re courageous. The habitual tendency when things get tough is that we protect ourselves, we get hard, we get rigid—[makes a chopping gesture]—Bapbapbapbap. But with this lojong idea, it’s completely topsy-turvy. When we want to get hard and stiff and adamant, that’s the time to soften and see how we might play or dance with the situation. Then everything is workable. In True Grit, my character—all the characters— are that way.

As an actor, fear comes up because I want to do a good job, an enlightened piece of work. You get attached to that, you overwork it, you overthink it. Then you come to the set, and people aren’t saying the lines as you imagined. It’s raining, and its supposed to be sunny. You thought you were invited to a cha-cha party, you’ve learned the steps, and they’re dancing the Viennese waltz! You can spend a lot of energy being upset, or you can get with the program—it’s that right effort thing—get the beauty of the way it is. Even before I was aware of lojong, this was something I applied to my life anyway.

Do you think of yourself as a Buddhist? A Buddhistly bent guy sounds kind of right. I haven’t taken the refuge vows.

Why not? I’m quite a lazy fellow.

You’ve been in 66 movies. You paint, you take professional-quality photographs, you use the power of celebrity to end hunger. You’re still married, and you play guitar and singwell enough to carry a CD of songs from Crazy Heart. I wonder if you’re selling yourself short. One of the lojong slogans comes to mind: “Of the two witnesses, hold to the principal one.”

Huh? Always hold true to your own perception. Your own self is your main teacher. I have a lot of different feelings about my laziness. Sometimes I enjoy it, kind of like the Dude.

Does it irritate you when people confuse you with the Dude? Oh God no. There’s a lot of stuff where we don’t match up and a lot where we do. I admire the Dude. He’s very true to himself, whereas I can get my hair shirt on and beat myself with my whips and say, Why can’t you take more interest in others?

You’ve been meditating for ten years, and you’re close friends with Lama Dawa Tarchin Phillips, a Kagyü teacher in Santa Barbara, and with Roshi Bernie Glassman, with whom you share an interest in alleviating hunger. But I still don’t get how you got started with Buddhism. There’s not really a hard edge to it. I’m just curious about all kinds of spirituality. Bernie’s given me some tips on meditation—he’s like a spiritual friend. I don’t have a formal teacher. Everybody I come in contact with is my teacher. Other actors are certainly my teachers. One of the cool things about acting is to realize how accessible love is. You can invest a person, another actor, as your love. I’m familiar with that feeling—I have this tight, strong relationship with my own wife. One of the reasons I’ve been married so long is that she has encouraged my art and my intimacy with other people. It’s important it’s not sexual—that can throw a wrench into the works. But when you get two people [on a set] opening their hearts to each other, that feeling of compassion and understanding is really accessible and quite deep. And the flip side is also true, of fear.

In the 1980s, I was a kind of a guinea pig for John Lilly, who invented the isolation tank. You sit in this tank of water at 98.6 degrees, you have no sensory input, and your mind produces all this output. It started very softly. Oh, this is kind of interesting [Takes on a California New Age singsong voice] and John seemed like a nice guy. And then, He was wearing a weird jumpsuit. Did he have…breasts? I let my mind run on that. Fear came—whoosh!—roaring into my body.

That’s the idea of shenpa [attachment or craving]: running, running and pretty soon that fear is hard as rock! That’s the kind of thing you do in acting, consciously, all the time. Now, where were we?

The isolation tank. Oh, yeah. I went, Wait a minute! That’s my mind! Instead of jumping out I made a little adjustment. I noticed I could breathe in and out slowly and observe my breath and not be in control of it. It was my first experience with meditation, although I didn’t call it that.

I have a lot of Christian input, too. You’ve got to read this guy [Nikos] Kazantzakis [author of The Last Temptation of Christ]. His whole thing was that Christ was just like us. And God was like an eagle with talons, coming into his head [Picks up his own hair], trying to pull him off the ground. Just like I have so much resistance to this Buddhist stuff. I’m attracted, but I’m a human being, I’m attached to myself, and I kind of dig it. You know?

Oh, yeah. This hunger thing, for instance. I mean, it’s not like it’s…

Not like it’s fun? Well, it can be fun. It’s a mindset. Werner [Erhard, founder of est training and one of the founders of the Hunger Project] said, “Here we have this condition that doesn’t have to be that way. We can end it.” I said to myself, Yeah, that seems right. And I noticed I had a resistance [to committing to do something], because I wanted to do other things with my time besides help people. So I said, Well, maybe let both of those things exist at the same time.

It’s like this. Preparing for a role, sometimes I’ll have to get in shape fast, lose a lot of weight. But I don’t want to work out so hard the first couple of days that I’m sore and I don’t like it. I thought I would apply the same thing to this hunger work. I would go toward the light, so to speak, but if it got too bright and too intense, ’cause basically what it’s asking you is Be Jesus, be Buddha—Give. And I’m not there. I’m not light yet. [Changes to another, higher voice.] So just because you’re not there yet, are you not going to do it?[Cocks his head.] So I go toward the light, and if my selfishness comes up too much I’ll stop for a second. And then I’ll take little baby steps toward it. I like to experiment with myself, to go against habitual self-gratification. And then you try it and you say [high voice], Oh, hey, I kind of got off when I did that. That kind of felt good! It’s like taking a shit. Sometimes it’s best to just pick up a magazine and get in there and sit, rather than Aaaaargh [mock straining]. It’ll kink up that way. Or when I’m doing yoga, I’ll go Put your head on your knees, you son of a bitch, come on, oh you can’t do it, oh you’re—

Uh-huh. Instead of just being gentle, kind. [Breathes out.] Aaaah. That grandmotherly attitude. Show up. Bear witness. And then the lovingkindness comes naturally.

Did anything change when you first started to formally meditate? I did. And my wife noticed, too. Just kind of a calmness, not so stressed out. And I’m wondering if this lojong theme, which I’m kind of getting into now, has really been going on all my life. That the very things you avoid, those are the blessings. It might even be a thread in the characters I’ve played. One in particular comes to mind, American Heart. I don’t know if you saw that.

It broke my heart. The 1992 film you starred in and helped produce—inspired by Martin Bell’s documentary Streetwise and Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of homeless Seattle kids. In the [Bell] documentary, a kid visits his dad in prison. The way he expresses love for his kid is to say, in so many words, “Don’t end up like me.” Well, that kid ended up hanging himself in a bathroom. There’s a scene of his father getting out of prison and looking at his kid in the casket and putting a Coke can to his [son’s] lips. I thought, What if that guy got out of prison and had to work with his kid? So you remember the scene in American Heart, where [my character] just gets out of prison, he’s in the bus station bathroom trying to get on his clothes, and here comes his kid. And he’s like, Oh, shit. Just what I need, I can’t deal with you. I’ll be lucky if I can survive myself. And it turns out that his kid was a blessing, the key to his life. The thing he was avoiding—you can apply this to the hunger thing we were talking about.

It occurs to me that making a movie is like making a Tibetan mandala of colored sand—you create a whole world on set, and then someone yells “Cut!” and the whole illusory world disappears. Movies are a wonderful spiritual playground. The film you actually make is like a beautiful snakeskin that you find on the ground and make a hatband out of. But the making of the movie is the snake itself. That is what I take with me. That includes hanging out with the other actors in the trailer after work, and getting into this position where you’ve empowered another actor to have a power over you, to affect you. That’s a spiritual place to be.

Crazy Heart, for instance, is a gorgeous snakeskin. But the snake of the thing was playing all of that wonderful music by Steven [Bruton] and T Bone [Burnett.] And the director, Scott [Cooper], did it in 24 days! The atmosphere he created—so open, so fresh and joyful. It was really a blessing in my life. That’s what you gamble for, and most of the time the movie falls short. And sometimes those high hopes are transcended, and it’s beyond what everyone thought it could be.

Making a movie is just a wonderful analogy for how the world might look. A movie’s like a child—if all the parents are doing their job, the movie is going to come out beautiful. That’s one of the ways that the world might be realized, working together. One of the reasons we decided to focus on children at the End Hunger Network is that the condition of the health of our children is a wonderful compass for how our society is functioning. Even as a little kid, I thought, Why can’t we get together and make it a groovy trip for everyone? There’s that concern with the self, the tightening, which seems to be preventing that.

Does being famous make it difficult for you to be in a sangha? I think of the sangha as a very soft, open thing. I’ve got people I’ve practiced with in a deep way for many years, like my wife, and my dear friends. Right now you’re in my sangha. We’ve touched in that way. Everyone I meet is in my sangha. I don’t know if that’s the proper definition, but that’s the way I’m going to hold it in my mind.

Final words for us? My mom used to say it to me, and my wife says it now. There’s even a slogan that says it! “Approach all situations with a joyful mind.” When I head out the door to go to work, my wife always says to me [Voice affectionate, up half an octave], “Now, remember! Have fun!”

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